Wireless communication services for mobile vehicles, such as navigation and roadside assistance, have increased rapidly in recent years and are expanding into new service areas. One such new area of service involves summoning emergency response teams to the site of a service subscriber's vehicle after the vehicle has been involved in an accident. The request for emergency assistance may be sent via a vehicle occupant or, under some circumstances, may be sent by the vehicle.
Emergency situations that involve medical assistance often require personal medical information about the person that is being treated. However, medical history information is not always available at the site of a traffic accident for the person requiring treatment. This may be due to, for example, the patient being unable to communicate.
One current system of alerting emergency medical professionals that a patient has special medical needs requires that the patient wear a bracelet or necklace bearing an emblem, for example, a MedicAlert® bracelet. The bracelet or necklace may include an engraved telephone number and medical information. For example, the bracelet may include information indicating that the patient is diabetic, allergic to certain medications or has surgical implants, such as a stent or a pacemaker. The telephone number that may be included on the bracelet can be used to contact a third party having additional information regarding the patient.
Though medical alert bracelets may provide needed information and peace of mind for the wearer, they do have serious limitations. One such limitation is the size of the engraving surface of the jewelry. In order to remain both wearable and fashionable, the size of the jewelry is kept small. Consequently, the size of the bracelet or necklace does not always allow a complete medical history to be engraved on the surface, resulting in the deletion of important medical information. Also, the engraved medical jewelry may not contain up to date information because updating the medical information would require the purchase of a new piece of jewelry. Another limitation of the medical alert jewelry is that they require the person to remember to wear the piece whenever they leave the home.
Other medical alert systems are inefficient in providing the medical information to emergency medical providers. One such system requires that the person carry a card containing personal information and a number to call to retrieve the medical information. This system is inefficient by requiring the medical response team to locate the card, contact the information provider using the telephone number on the card and wait for the information to be relayed to the medical provider. All of these actions waste valuable time when providing emergency medical care.
It is an object of this invention, therefore, to provide a system and method of communicating personal information to healthcare providers that overcomes the deficiencies and obstacles described above.